Exclusive: Top green advisor slams Department for Transport renewables efforts

The government's top sustainability advisor has warned the UK will have to generate far more electricity from renewable sources by 2020 than it is currently planning, as a result of the failure to adequately accelerate the development of renewable transport fuel and heat.

Speaking exclusively to BusinessGreen.com, Jonathon Porritt, the chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, said that government officials now privately accepted that up to 45 per cent of the UK's electricity mix will have to come from renewables sources if it is to meet the EU target requiring it to generate 15 per cent of its energy from renewables by 2020.

Officially, the government's "central scenario" is for 32 per cent of the electricity mix to come from renewables by 2020, a target it is aiming to achieve through a huge expansion in offshore wind capacity supported by growth in biomass power and, to a smaller extent, microgeneration technologies such as solar panels.

But Porritt said concerns were mounting that more electricity will have to come from renewables to make up for the likely failure to meet targets to generate 14 per cent of UK heat and 10 per cent of transport fuel from renewables.

"Inside government - though they may not issue this publicly - they are reckoning they will probably have to do 45 per cent of the total take from electricity," he said, adding that the bulk of the blame for the shortfall in other areas should be laid at the door of the Department for Transport.

"If you look at the real expectations around heat and transport, you have to be massively optimistic to think we'll meet those, particularly on transport," he said. "The Department of Transport (DfT) has shown no real innovation at all, no real interest in driving behaviour change or technology shift to achieve the percentage gain we need on transport."

His comments were supported by at least one industry insider who said that the DfT had been largely reactive in its efforts to cut carbon emissions and had not matched the willingness to engage with the renewables sector evident in other departments.

However, a spokeswoman for the DfT rejected the criticism, insisting that the department remained fully committed to tackling climate change and adding that the target for generating 10 per cent of transport fuel from renewable sources is legally binding under the government's Renewable Fuels Obligation.

"As part of the agreement on cutting CO2 emissions from new cars, the UK was at the forefront of pushing for a challenging long-term target for 2020 which has the potential to be the biggest CO2 saving measure in transport; is pushing forward with a sustainable Renewable Fuels Obligation; and is putting significant funding into the development of ultra-low carbon and electric vehicles," she said.